Finding a job is one thing — and an important thing, to be sure. But unless we spend the time and energy to figure out what we really want to be doing, we’re going to land right back where we are now: frustrated, restless, lost, and unhappy. This is where we talk about how we can uncover the things we most want to do with our lives. It’s also where I test out tools so you don’t have to. Click here for past posts.

Let me tell you a brief story

There are lots of reasons I left academia. But one I don’t talk about as much is this: I was bored out of my everloving mind.

Sure, I could turn my dissertation into a manuscript. I was told that after you leave it alone for a while, it becomes interesting again. Um, fail.

Sure, I could research something sort of related but sort of different – it’s taking something in a new direction! Fail.

Sure, I could throw myself into my teaching. Fail, fail, fail.

And I can’t tell you that departmental politics, committee meetings, or advising were altogether diverting.

It really wasn’t them. It was me.

It wasn’t that my situation was unusual. Turning your dissertation into a book? Normal. Taking your research in a new direction? Normal. Engaging teaching as an intellectually rich endeavor (because it is)? Normal.

I, however, was apparently not normal.

And I suspect that many of you may be more like me than like my graduate student friends who are happily tenured and writing and teaching.

I see it again and again

Many of my clients – you could even say most of my clients – have something in common besides academia. They love learning for the sake of learning. Left to their own devices (and with sufficient money to make it happen), they’d probably just keep taking class after class, just because.

It’s how we all landed in academia in the first place. Where else does someone who loves learning go but on to more schooling?

The problem with that, of course, schooling has an end-point, and with that end-point comes the presumption that all of your schooling has been aimed at a career.

But what if it wasn’t?

Many of us went to graduate school because we loved the idea of being a professor. Few of us really knew what that meant, though. Sure, we knew professors taught students, but most of the rest of their job – advising, serving on committees, participating in shared governance, publishing or perishing – was invisible to us.

What we thought they did, in addition to all of that teaching, was read. Think. Learn. Of course those of us who love to learn things would think it was a great idea.

Breadth vs. depth

But one of the realities of academia is that you are, to a large extent, limited in what you can dive into. Jobs are disciplinary. Contracts are disciplinary. Teaching is disciplinary.

My friends who love academia look at me a little strangely, because they did go on to learn other things. The difference was that they looked at a different 19^th century educator, or dipped in to Burke, or wrote about bodies in the same era of rhetoric they’d been writing me.

Me, I wanted to go learn about geography. (There is such a thing as cultural geography! Feminist geography! How cool is that?) I wanted to learn color theory. I wanted to learn whale speech. I wanted to learn psychology.

English is an admittedly baggy field, but it wasn’t baggy enough for me. And my department and my teaching requirements were definitely not baggy enough for me.

If I had paid any attention to my own patterns, I would have been able to predict this. See, my particular strength is not depth, it’s breadth. I know lots and lots about many different things, things that don’t, on first glance, seem to go together.

I’m what Barbara Sher calls a scanner. And many of the people I talk to who are unhappy with academia are scanners too.

Scanners are the Renaissance people of our times

There are lots of types of scanners, scanners who return to the same four beloved but disparate topics, scanners who are always finding new projects, scanners who love to become masters at things, and scanners whose intellectual CV looks a lot like the Energizer Bunny took a run through the encyclopedia at high speed.

We’re the people who really like learning about personality types, and transition theory, and how to build houses, and how paint colors came to be discovered and invented and created, and the history of ballet, and mind/body theory, and how investigative police work happens, and how proto-humans ate. All at the same time, probably while building a bike and learning how to take photographic portraits and teaching the dog to behave.

It used to be that people like us were beloved, but in the last few decades, specialization has taken over from the fascinated generalist. And nowhere more than in academia.

Scanners and academia don’t get along

Academia is predicated on depth of knowledge. By its very structure, it’s predicated on everyone staying within the confines of the discipline.

You can see where things might get hairy for those of us who thrive on dipping our toes into new topics all the time.

Because of this mismatch, it’s easy to think we’ve failed, that there’s something wrong with us. But there’s nothing wrong with us. We don’t thrive in this environment, is all. We need a different climate in which to truly flourish – one that has our particular version of scanner-ness built in somehow.

If you love to learn and yet are finding yourself struggling in academia, chances are, nothing is wrong with you.

Want to read more about scanners? Click here to go to an affiliate link to Barbara Sher’s Refuse to Choose on Amazon.

If you’d like some help figuring out what else you might be able to do, Jo Van Every and I are running a 6-week course designed to help the academically inclined expand their sense of career possibility. You can learn more here.

Finding a job is one thing — and an important thing, to be sure. But unless we spend the time and energy to figure out what we really want to be doing, we’re going to land right back where we are now: frustrated, restless, lost, and unhappy. This is where we talk about how we can uncover the things we most want to do with our lives. It’s also where I test out tools so you don’t have to. Click here for past posts.

Your hobbies are useful to thinking about your calling

When you’re thinking about what you’re called to do – or at least what you want to do next – don’t forget to look at your hobbies, all of those things you do in your spare time, all of those things that make you relaxed and happy and creative and accomplished.

Before you start hollering at me that that’s impractical, just hear me out.

What your hobbies get you

First of all, you already do your hobbies without getting paid to do them. You run or do ceramics or paint model horses or knit or climb boulders or invent small machines that will fish the socks out from underneath the couch. By definition, a hobby is something you’re passionate about to some extent.

Second, because you’re engaged in this hobby, you’ve assimilated to one degree or another all of the specialized language, knowledge, and insiderness of that field. You know and understand things that people who do not participate do not know and understand.

Both of these things – passion and insider knowledge – are valuable.

It’s probably not what you think

I’m not suggesting that you can start making a career tomorrow out of climbing boulders. Or knitting sweaters. Or drinking beer. Or whatever form your hobby currently takes. While that may actually be possible, it’s probably not the simplest way in.

But every hobby, every passion, has a whole host of companies, organizations, activities, and stuff that make that hobby possible. Someone has to design and manufacture the equipment. Someone has to distribute it. Someone has to manufacture the actual supplies the hobbyists and experts need. Someone has to make it available for you, the hobbyist, to access.

Someone has to be the expert teacher. Someone has to organize the tours. Someone has to coordinate getting that yarn into the hands of the knitters who want it. Someone has to convince bars to stock this new brand of beer.

What I am suggesting is that your passion and your knowledge are valuable in all of those spaces, because it’s less you have to learn. And if you combine your passion and your knowledge of your hobby with the other skills you undoubtedly have – organizing people or things, public speaking, teaching, designing curricula, coaching people one on one, etc. – then you’ve got an incredibly useful set of things to talk about in an actual application.

You do not have to turn your hobby into anything

This isn’t to say that your hobby is automatically the way to go. You may want to keep your hobby a hobby. You might be the kind of person who likes to dip lightly into dozens of hobbies and never dive deeply into any. That is okay.

When I suggest you look at your hobbies, what I’m really asking you to do is to look around at the rest of your life for clues, ideas, and directions for where you might go next. It’s easy to get so caught in the academic mindset that we don’t actually look beyond our academic work. But you have a whole, valuable life that’s full of all kinds of things you’ve already done and could do. Just look.

If you’re struggling to figure out what you’re called to do, or even what you might want to do next, Jo VanEvery and I teach a telecourse on choosing your career consciously. It covers how to find things you might want to do, how to pay attention to your life for clues, and how to look at what you actually bring to the table. If you’d like to find out when it’s running again, click here to sign up for our advanced notice list.

Finding a job is one thing — and an important thing, to be sure. But unless we spend the time and energy to figure out what we really want to be doing, we’re going to land right back where we are now: frustrated, restless, lost, and unhappy. This is where we talk about how we can uncover the things we most want to do with our lives. It’s also where I test out tools so you don’t have to. Click here for past posts.

The myth of the straight line

We have this idea that successful lives are linear, that if you were really meant to be a pianist or an engineer or a kindergarten teacher that the seeds of that life would have been manifest in our earliest days.

This is only reinforced by the way we talk and think about celebrities or “great people” – Tiger Woods, Mozart, Jodie Foster, Mahatma Ghandi. Whatever the reality, we want their lives to be written like novels, full of foreshadowing and fulfillment. It meets some deep need in us for resolution.

But as Mark Twain famously said, “Of course truth is stranger than fiction. Fiction has to make sense.”

We aren’t likely to become celebrities

There are lots of reasons why our lives aren’t going to look like the public version of theirs.

First off, the narrative of their lives published in glossy magazines and thick biographies is likely to be much, much, much different than their lived experience of their lives. We can’t compare our insides to their outsides any more than we can compare their insides to their outsides. They’re always different.

Second, the people who get profiled and written about are nearly always the best of the best of the best. They’ve risen to the top of a very narrow field, and to do that requires the proverbial 10,000 hours of deep practice. Crazy focus is the wages of reaching those heights.

But I’m going to guess that you don’t actually want to be Tiger Woods or Jodie Foster.

Let’s define success

Our culture likes to define success in terms of three things: fame, money, and prestige. Ideally you want all three, but any one will do.

While I’m sure none of us would turn down the kind of money thrown around in “successful” circles, I’d also challenge us to think more deeply about what it means to be successful.

When researchers study happiness, what they find is that it’s not money that makes people happy, nor success as conventionally defined. Rather, it’s time spent in work that is challenging, absorbing, and meaningful to the individual.

Back to this idea of linearity

All of that means that, as we grow as people and as we have ongoing experiences both professional and personal, what is going to be challenging, absorbing, and meaningful to us is likely to shift over time. If it didn’t, challenging would soon become monumentally frustrating. Absorbing would become obsessing. Meaningful would become proving a point.

For those of us who aren’t going to be the very best ball player or flautist or dancer or corporate raider or whatever in the whole entire world, we don’t need 10,000 hours in one thing. We need constant growth and curiosity and exploration.

Our lives don’t have to be linear, because we’re writing a different narrative.

That doesn’t meant that, as we find and explore the work that is challenging, absorbing, and meaningful to us that there won’t be threads that connect the different eras of our lives – because there will be. We will always be ourselves doing all of these things.

But it does mean that we don’t have to identify or understand the thread in the present. Our only job is to continually seek out work that is challenging, absorbing, and meaningful to us.

The wide, wide world

One of the challenges of a non-linear life is being able to identify what comes next.

When things are linear, there’s a clear next step. When our lives are non-linear, we often have to seek out the next step. That can be frightening both the possibilities are both infinite and unknown. There are far more jobs and careers out there than are dreamt of in our academic philosophy.

But there are ways to tame that fear, because there are ways to both explore the unknown and limit the infinite. Remember – in a non-linear life, your job is not finding the Thing You Will Do Forever. It’s only finding the Next Right Step.

And that is simply a matter of marrying your curiosity to some everyday explorations.

Jo VanEvery and I are teaching an 8-week class by conference call that helps you do just that. If you’re interested in learning more, click here.

But whatever you do, remember that what comes next doesn’t have to be determined by what came before it. It only needs to be something challenging, absorbing, and meaningful.